A Middle-Aged Writer's Quest To Start Learning To Code For the First Time (1843magazine.com)

OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: The Economist's 1843 magazine details one middle-aged writer's (Andrew Smith) quest to learn to code for the first time, after becoming interested in the "alien" logic mechanisms that power completely new phenomena like crypto-currency and effectively make the modern world function in the 21st Century. The writer discovers that there are over 1,700 actively used computer programming languages to choose from, and that every programmer that he asks "Where should someone like me start with coding?" contradicts the next in his or her recommendation. One seasoned programmer tells him that programmers discussing what language is best is the equivalent of watching "religious wars." The writer is stunned by how many of these languages were created by unpaid individuals who often built them for "glory and the hell of it." He is also amazed by how many people help each other with coding problems on the internet every day, and the computer programmer culture that non-technical people are oblivious of.

Eventually the writer finds a chart of the most popular programming languages online, and discovers that these are Python, Javascript, and C++. The syntax of each of these languages looks indecipherable to him. The writer, with some help from online tutorials, then learns how to write a basic Python program that looks for keywords in a Twitter feed. The article is interesting in that it shows what the "alien world of coding" looks like to people who are not already computer nerds and in fact know very little about how computer software works. There are many interesting observations on coding/computing culture in the article, seen through the lens of someone who is not a computer nerd and who has not spent the last two decades hanging out on Slashdot or Stackoverflow.

Comments

Re:1843 is a misleading title.

[TheRaven64]

Andrew Smith, the author of the article Slashdot is reviewing, seems to have no deep knowledge of technology, and no serious interest in learning.

And he's getting silly answers because he's asking the wrong question. Asking 'what is the best way to learn to program?' is like asking 'what is the best way of learning to write well?'. Do you want to learn to write news articles, opinion, marketing copy, novels, technical manuals? The answer will be different in each case, with the possible exception that (as with learning to program) you will be told to practice a lot. If you start with the problem that you want to solve, you will get very different answers, but they might actually be useful.

Re:meanwhile, in the kitchen...

[TheRaven64]

Because it's showing a stunning level of ignorance where it can't even express the problem before. Consider someone trying to learn physics in the same way. They don't really indicate the things that they want to understand and are then shocked that brane theory and string theory seem contradictory and each have strong proponents. They went straight to quantum mechanics because they kept asking people 'how do I learn physics' without saying 'I want to understand the path that a ball will travel when I throw it' (or whatever the real problem that they're trying to solve is). Shockingly, the author discovers that a discipline that people devote an entire professional career to learning a fairly small subset of is difficult to pick up in a few hours.

Re:Don't comment if you didn't read it

[serviscope_minor]

Don't comment if you didn't read it

You must be new here. The point of slashdot it to read the headline then angrily shit on the people in TFA.